FOLLOW US

Comio C2 review: Another budget smartphone

Top Features

*Good build quality*Good battery backup*Decent performance

Have you ever tried boarding a local train from Dadar station in Mumbai during rush hour? Or for that matter the Metro from Rajiv Chowk in Delhi? It’s a sea of people trying to squeeze in wherever they can find space. That’s what the budget smartphone market feels like at the moment. It’s like smartphone makers are launching phones for the segment without taking a pause. We can’t blame them as the Indian consumers are price-conscious and look for offerings with lot of features at ‘best price’.

Comio is the latest to join the budget segment smartphone bandwagon and it launched three smartphones in the country recently. Out of all the smartphones launched, we tested the Comio C2, which comes with a price tag of Rs 7,499. We used the smartphone for some time and here’s our complete review.

Design and displayThe Comio C2 looks much better as compared to the other smartphones in this price segment. The device comes with a plastic body with removable back panel. The smartphone comes in Blue colour and it's ports and buttons are Gold in colour which gives a nice look and feel to the smartphone. Going by the looks, you will find Comio C2 quite bulky, but it's not that heavy.

The smartphone comes with round corners and textured back panel which offers a firm grip to the users. The right side of the smartphone consists of the volume rockers and circular power button in gold colour. The bottom houses the micro USB charging port, while the 3.5mm audio jack sits on the top. On the rear panel you will find the 8MP camera with LED flash, Comio branding and a speaker grille. The front of the smartphone is dominated by a 5-inch HD display and 8MP selfie camera with flash. At the bottom of the display you will find 3 capacitive keys, which are painted on the screen. You will find the SIM card and microSD card slots underneath the removable back panel along with the non- removable 4000 mAh battery. The phone has a plastic body yet Comio C2 is a good looking device.

The smartphone features a 5-inch HD display with 720x1280 pixel resolution. The display is reasonably good considering the price of the smartphone. The viewing angles are fine, but the visibility under direct sunlight is not that great. The company has also included a Mira vision feature in the display, which allows real-time enhancement of picture quality. Users can also manually adjust the display settings as per their need.
Performance and cameraThe Comio C2 is powered by a quad-core MediaTek processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage. During our testing we found the smartphone satisfactory for normal usage. You can surf the internet, make calls and play light games easily on the device. However, you will feel a lag during multi- tasking and playing heavy games. While testing it's performance, we also ran Antutu and GeekBench 4 tests on our device. While the phone scored 25,387 in Antutu Benchmarks, the single-core and multi-core scores on GeekBench 4 were 463 and 4711 respectively.

The audio quality is mediocre both on headphones and loudspeaker. The call quality was just fine and we faced some issues during signal reception. The smartphone is backed by a 4000 mAh battery and it easily lasts for day and a half on single charge.

The Comio C2 runs Android 7.0 Nougat operating system topped with the own UI of the company. The smartphone comes with the August security patch which is quite old. The device doesn't come with an app drawer, which means that your apps will clutter the home screen. The smartphone also comes pre- loaded with company's own apps such as anti- theft, Comio connect, SIM toolkit and others. The apps take a lot of space and you are left with 11GB of internal storage. Other than this it offers all the features of Android Nougat.

The smartphone comes equipped with an 8MP rear and front camera accompanied with LED flash on both the ends. The camera app is really basic and it offers three shooting modes -- panorama, time lapse and watermark. It also offers live filters which can be used by capturing an image. The camera is distinctly average with images captured outdoors were much better than images taken indoors. The images taken in dim light turned out to be grainy. The colour reproduction was also not that great. On the other hand, the selfie camera just about did its job. It comes with an LED flash for capturing low light selfies, but that is also not of much help. The device also offer beauty mode, which will enhance your selfies. In all the camera of the device is slightly above average.

Verdict

Comio C2 comes at a price tag of Rs 7,199 and has all the standard features of a budget smartphone. The smartphone's performance too is decent. As for camera, it is quite average. Among the misses, a major miss is fingerprint sensor which has become almost a standard feature in all smartphones in this segment. On price front, Comio C2 faces tough completion from the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Y1 Lite and Moto C. As both the smartphones offer better specifications in the same price bracket. To bring the ‘Dadar local’ analogy again: there’s a joke based on a popular soft drink ad which goes like this: “Darr ke aagey jeet hai, Dadar ke aagey seat hai”. Maybe brands need to look beyond the ‘Dadar’ station of smartphones.